Category Archives: Botnets

Starting on October 28, we saw a new hook used to try and trick users into installing a Trojan on their computer – Free Pizza. Fans of Robert Heinlein will be familiar with the acronym TANSTAAFL – There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. In this case TANSTAAFPE – There Ain’t No Such […]

Recently, a malware attack in China infected around 100,000 Android devices in a few days. FireEye described the attack in their blog, and christened it XXShenqi. They call it a phishing attack, but I prefer the term worm, in that infected devices sent SMS messages to the owner’s contact list attempting to convince them to […]

The risk posed by vulnerable home internet routers was a common theme at this year’s Black Hat and DEF CON conferences. These devices are becoming notorious for having security vulnerabilities, which often go unpatched. The SOHOpelessly Broken contest at DEF CON provided a dramatic demonstration of these flaws, as contestants attacked consumer-grade routers and quickly broke into them. But […]

I was watching an excellent presentation by Rob Ragan and Oscar Salazar when I realized that I hate free stuff. Not of course the free stuff that I use, I’m fine with that. It’s all the free stuff that spammers and other cyber criminals exploit that ticks me off. Let me explain what Ragan and […]

Just in time for the Black Hat convention, the New York Times is reporting the discovery by Hold Security that a team of Russian Hackers have collected a total of 1.2 billion user names and passwords from 420,000 different websites, along with 542 million email addresses. Although this dwarfs the Target breach in sheer volume, […]

Spammers and attackers in both email and SMS were quick to redouble their efforts this quarter. In our 2014 Q2 Global Messaging Threat Report, we take a look at some of these various new trends popping up around the world. Comically, email phishers were quick to exploit the Heartbleed exploit without using the exploit. Deploying […]

Pinterest was hit this week by a vast diet pill spam attack from a well established cyber criminal gang we call the Com Spammers. As well as attacks on social networking sites such as Pinterest, they have also been active for years in email and SMS spam. Their landing pages often contain video clips from […]

Current events around the world became the focal point of many malicious and innocuous spam campaigns in the email and mobile messaging space this quarter. In Cloudmark’s 2014 Q1 Global Messaging Threat Report we’ve detailed several malicious campaigns that have reverted to a more old fashioned way of distributing malware, email spam, following the arrest […]

April 12th is the 20th anniversary of the first large scale commercial spam – the infamous “Green Card Lawyers” message that was posted to every newsgroup on Usenet News (right). Though there were attempts at spamming starting as early as 1978, they went out to hundreds of users rather than the hundreds of thousands that […]

At Cloudmark, we have long recognized that we are in an arms race against the spammers. Spammers are continually trying to come up with new techniques for getting through our spam filters, and we are constantly monitoring their activities and staying one step ahead. It seems that the same thing is now happening in the […]